Tools

Mountains for Clouds, Foxing, My Dad, Bag

When: Sat., Dec. 21, 6 p.m. 2013Price: $5

Michigan indie label Count Your Lucky Stars, founded in 2007 by Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) front man Keith Latinen, has released some of the best albums from the blossoming fourth-wave emo scene. Mathy Chicago four-piece Mountains for Clouds, with their command of the intimate side of the 90s midwestern sound, have the potential to be one of the best bands on CYLS. This year’s Maybe It’s Already Everywhere feels as warm as sitting in front of a crackling fireplace while snow gently falls outside, and it gets even better when Mountains for Clouds break away from recycling second-wave guitar patterns—on “That Night a Forest Grew” a familiar twinkly riff fights through swells of shoegaze-style distortion, which drop out and leave it sounding transformed into something like emo Krautrock. Labelmates Foxing open the show, and these Saint Louis gentlemen belong in a venue grander than Township: they recorded their recent debut album, The Albatross, with a string section, a handful of woodwind players, and a small army of backing vocalists, transforming cozy tunes indebted to American Football into towering symphonic songs fit for concert halls. I hope the audience steps up and fills in for the crowd of guest vocalists belting out the chorus of the elegiac “Intuit.”—Leor GalilMountains for Clouds headlines; Foxing, My Dad, and Bag open.